A Sense of Wholeness:
An Interview with Kai Carlson-Wee
On the pages of RAIL, the musings, torment and wanderlust of author Kai Carlson-Wee are laid bare, offering the reader an intimate look at his life and psyche. Throughout this journey into Carlson-Wee’s story lines become blurred—between the symbolic and the real, the fleeting and the essential, the memory, and the dream. This shifting spectrum reflects the nature of the life depicted in RAIL: hopping trains, life without an address, drug use, danger and psych medication. However, RAIL’s frequent tone of pain and desolation is juxtaposed with vivid descriptions of beautiful landscapes and warm moments, assertions of the power of camaraderie, and a strong case in favor of resilience.
The following interview attempts to dive deeper into RAIL, by clarifying the creative process, separating reality from symbol, and fleshing out the landscapes, both physical and psychological, that comprise its poems.
1. Homelessness and depression, or mental instability, are two topics that recur throughout Rail. These are things that you obviously have personal experience with, as your poems are derived from a deeply personal, if not autobiographical place. What do you think Americans need to know, or to understand, about the reality of mental illness? Despite it being something that people work to avoid, do you think that there is anything romantic, or positive about depression? Is there anything valuable in the way it affects or changes the individual?
I wish I could say yes, that it’s valuable somehow, but my relationship to depression is complicated. When I was in my early twenties I had two mental breakdowns. Each one lasted about a year and I didn’t really know what was wrong. I couldn’t read books. I couldn’t focus on basic conversations, anything happening in linear time. The world seemed fragmented and I spent long stretches in bed. I was eventually diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder and borderline schizophrenia, which basically means that I have a depression cycle every few years that can trigger distorted thoughts. At it’s worst, I experience panic attacks and paranoid delusions. I start thinking people are conspiring against me and trying to poison me. My doctors had a hard time pinpointing the problem, and I eventually healed myself through a combination of medications, writing poetry, and traveling on my own. Hitchhiking, road tripping, backpacking, train hopping. These experiences became the basis for my book, RAIL, and I honestly wish I could have romanticized it more. I wish I could have done more of ‘hero’s journey’ type thing, but the truth about depression, at least in my experience, is that it just plain sucks. It sucks and it’s made worse by the way we stigmatize mental health problems in America. We tend to see them as either chemical problems, requiring drugs to fix, or behavioral problems, requiring therapy and a shift in behavior (willpower). There’s a feeling that there’s a “correct” way to function in American society, to behave in “normal,” capitalistic ways. The problem with this is that people who are experiencing mental health issues are expected to see themselves as deficient. The value of the experience is in the individual’s effort to “get better” and eventually triumph over their mental illness, regaining some sense of normalcy. This results in people not wanting to admit when they’re sick, not seeking treatment, and believing in a social stigma that assumes healing is up to the individual. When I was depressed I was very lonely, I was very lost, and the “value” I found in the experience was figured out much later. The past is often revised by the present, and I’ve revised that chapter of my life to be more interesting than it was. During the actual periods of depression, it was just very bleak.
2. Rail describes, vividly and personally, individuals that have been pushed past the borders of mainstream society into the fringes – the homeless, the different, the mentally ill. Do you think that those in mainstream society generally lack empathy for the people on the fringes of society? What forces influence and pressure people into ignoring and disregarding these types of people? What have you learned about the experience of homelessness and what might a more compassionate understanding of it look like?
I was never really “homeless” while I was traveling. I slept outside and went for months without an address, but it felt different than some of the people I met on the street, who were suffering from a variety of issues. I had a family, I had a home to return to if needed. I was never destitute. But again, the situation was not as black-and-white as most people want to assume. Some of the folks I met on the street had families to return to. Some had apartments or houses, but chose, for various reasons (addiction, mental health issues, divorce, life transitions, etc.) to live outside normal American society. In train-riding culture there’s an idea of transience that goes back to the Great Depression and the myth of the American West. It’s an idea as much as it is a reality. Most of the people I’ve met riding trains are itinerant more than they are homeless, but the idea of homelessness still persists. In a larger context, it’s also related to ideas of transience in blues music, spiritual hymns, Westerns, folk music, country music, the history of America itself. There’s a story of rootlessness and immigration infused into many aspects of American identity. In my own family, my ancestors immigrated from Norway in 1903, and, like so many other families in this country, began effacing the cultural identities of the homeland they left behind. It’s no surprise that Americans value freedom over national identity, future possibilities over reconciliation with the past. When I write about homelessness in my book, I’m writing about all these different things at once. In my own experiences traveling I’ve met many people living in ways that would be considered ‘homeless’ or off-the-grid, and each one has a unique story and a unique reason for living the way they do. One of the problems with the conversation is that labeling people as “homeless” tends to dehumanize and stigmatize their experiences, rather than allowing for channels of empathy. We look at people on the street and tend to pity them, assuming their circumstances are tragic. But what happens if we listen to their version of the experience? What happens if we value their insights to the same degree as we value our judgment? In RAIL I tried to write about real people I met on the road without painting them as ‘homeless’ or down-and-out or whatever. I tried to write about their actual perspective more than their circumstance.
3. Although Rail is full of creative, descriptive, and rhetorical language, much of the content of your poems and their titles are very direct and realistic, examples being “DEPRESSION” (p. 19) and “CRYSTAL METH” (p. 46). Do you believe that creative literary expression is most effective when the subject matter is approached and addressed head-on? Is there an element of artistic therapy, or creative release, in writing about such challenging subjects and experiences in a direct way? Do you think that, in general, there is something to be gained by approaching our personal difficulties or traumas head-on?
I think so. Naming a thing is a powerful act. Giving language to the world is a powerful act. It’s maybe a way of reclaiming ‘lost time,’ or redefining a stigmatized term. I mean, it took me a long time to admit that I was depressed, that I could write about depression as a way of moving through it. For me, titles like “Depression” are not signifiers of an edgy experience but are ways to make the title my own, on my own terms. It feels liberating to me. When I started writing RAIL I was very conscious of wanting it to be autobiographical and based on actual experience. I might have changed a location here or there, but the poems are based on real people and real situations. The persona poems are dictated from actual conversations. Not much has been altered there. The travel poems were largely written while I was actually traveling. I wanted the poems to be drawn from reality, from fact more than fiction. There are many poets who try to make their work dramatic by being elusive or appropriating other people’s experiences as their own, and, while I don’t think it’s necessarily off-limits, it’s just not my project. I wanted to be able to stand in front of an audience and read these poems with conviction, with something clear and empirical to offer. Naming something directly can be cathartic and part of healing various traumas, but it can also be part of the contract you make with the audience, the way you give integrity to the work.
4. In “MENTAL HEALTH” (p. 24) you reference and describe taking specific psych medications, namely Ativan and Seroquel. These are medications that can have a profound quieting effect on the mind, on thought, and on perception. For many, psych meds can bring desperately needed stability – did they do this for you? Conversely, could you speak to the dark side – the unadvertised, unexpected, destructive side of psych meds? Can you describe how it felt, in terms of your identity, and your ability to express yourself, both creatively and in general, to be on a powerful antipsychotic like Seroquel?
I started taking Seroquel because my therapist thought I was suicidal. This was around 2006, during my senior year of college. My head was in a very bad place and I was having a hard time separating delusion from reality. I was cutting myself and thinking obsessively about burying myself in the ground. I ended up in the emergency room at one point and spent a night climbing over the guardrail on the Washington Avenue Bridge. My psychiatrist wanted to quiet the delusions, which, I admit, probably needed to happen, but the effect was very destructive. After a few weeks it felt like someone had drilled a hole in my head and sucked out my imagination. I couldn’t think abstractly at all and my life just seemed to pass in front of my face like I was watching it underwater. I quit having panic attacks and the paranoia disappeared, but I was pretty catatonic. It felt like a lobotomy. I was on those drugs for about four months and I’ll never go on them again. They made me gain weight, they canceled my personality (glazed eyes), and they prevented any imaginative thinking. Seroquel and Abilify, both very difficult for me. I’m on Wellbutrin right now and I still take Ativan from time to time, but I’ve had positive reactions to both. Wellbutrin makes everything brighter and more available. I’m a big fan of Wellbutrin.
Portrait of Kai Carlson-Wee by John Haynes
5. Rail describes a somewhat cold society, one in which outsiders must endure physical and emotional pain throughout the fight for survival. Do you think that the reality of this kind of cold society, lacking compassion and often very difficult to exist in, is inevitable? If the kind of outsider described in Rail were to wake up one day in an ideal society – the kind of society that could mend their wounds, lift them up, empower them – what would that society look like?
I don’t know if there’s an answer to this. Sociologists and philosophers have been trying to figure this out for a long time—the ideal society. Many religions function in ways to create socio-economic leveling effects, empathy between classes, at least in theory. In America, we’ve got a capitalist system that has replaced gods with celebrities, spirituality with ideals of personal freedom. We worship the Kardashians and James Franco and the stock market. We turn to influencers and tutorial videos on YouTube for guidance. The sacred has become boring somehow, old fashioned. Through social media platforms, we’ve actually started to worship ourselves, weirdly enough. We follow people who are interested in the same things and cultivate idealized portraits of ourselves based on the reward system of “likes.” There’s not much room for honesty, artistry, debate, radical thinking. Everything we post becomes watered down and homogenous. Most of the stuff I post on social media has already been compromised by the time I post it, however subconsciously. We supposedly have access to unlimited information but we end up living in these solipsistic echo-chambers. The goal, it seems, is to narrow our identities down a single note (sentimental positivity) and to become famous to only ourselves. I don’t know if this is a contemporary problem or a newer version of a old human problem, but we can’t seem to understand that existence is fluid, part of a larger whole. The “society” that could possibly mend our wounds already exists, we already have access to it, but our definitions of selfhood, of culture, of healing, are too limited. When we can see ourselves in the fabric of a continuum, when we can value the life of a single ant, of a single flowing river, of a single cloud, as much as we value our own, then we might be able to finally wake up in healing world. But the healing won’t come from philanthropy or donations to a cause, it will come from within.
6. Frequently throughout Rail, and in detail in poems like “AMERICAN FREIGHT” (p. 51) and “RIDING THE HIGHLINE” (p. 69), a kind of lust for motion, for escape, for leaving the place that you happen to be in favor for the journey towards somewhere else is described. In what ways is motion, or leaving, therapeutic? During the days of your life described in Rail, what did motion mean to you, and in what ways was it able to function as a coping mechanism?
Movement has always been important to me, as a physical thing but also as a kind of principal. Growing up, I spent a lot of time biking and skateboarding, riding go-carts, sledding down hills, etc. Anything that allowed me some speed. When I was thirteen I discovered rollerblading and became unnaturally obsessed. I skated for 10 years, 5-10 hours a day, and eventually moved out to California to do it professionally. I fell in love with the feeling of grinding down handrails, sliding from one location to the next. When you’re skating a rail it feels like some form of levitation, like sliding on ice. It’s a beautiful feeling.
When I was twenty-three I quit skating and I went through those breakdowns I mentioned earlier. Looking back on it now, I think it was probably because my brain was being starved of Dopamine and Serotonin after so many years of skating, getting rush after rush of adrenaline. There was the physical release of positive brain chemicals, the synaptic satisfaction, but there was also a feeling of flow I would enter, of moving in synch with the universe. Athletes and musicians often talk about this kind of feeling. A departure from time, a release from conscious thought. When I started traveling spontaneously, without a plan or destination, I discovered a similar feeling. It was a departure from life in a physical sense, from responsibilities and relationships, but there was also a spiritual element, a feeling of freedom and release. In a weird way, I think I was trying to replicate the feeling of skating, but on a larger scale. I took psych meds, I ate healthy, developed positive routines, but the movement was also important for healing. It seemed to reignite my brain.
7. The Cloudmaker is a recurring figure in Rail, and in “THE CLOUDMAKER’S BAG” (p. 38) some of his background is revealed. He is described as “seven years homeless” (12-13), scraping out a precarious survival from “handouts, gravedigger jobs he has only been fired from” (13-14). Approaching the Cloudmaker as a tangible, real, individual person – is there hope for him? Would it be possible for him to integrate into mainstream society? Would he even want to? Would that kind of reintegration be good for him? What is the best possible resolution for the Cloudmaker?
The Cloudmaker is based on a real guy I met in Seattle, in 2007. He had this shock of white hair and a big gray beard and looked a little like a young Walt Whitman. I thought he was slightly crazy at first, but the more I talked to him, the more his logic became clear and I realized he had this electric view of the world. He said he could control the weather, that he had a ‘cloudbuster’ machine that he would stand in to harness energy (something William Burroughs also did). He said he could talk to birds and that cops had one time drugged him and implanted recording devices in his brain. He said they would steal his dreams and make maps out of his unconscious mind. I had been paranoid about stuff like this in the past, and I just really empathized with what he was saying. I thought he was extremely interesting. I’ve met plenty of people with wild theories and unique philosophies, but he was more inspiring somehow, he had a light around him. In making him a character in the book, I didn’t want to use him symbolically as some sort of social commentary, I wanted to show the logic of his mind and the originality of his thinking.
8. The people described in Rail, yourself included, are deeply affected by pain, by the loss of romantic and familial love, by battles with physical and mental health. Despite all of this, there is an aura of hope surrounding Rail, an imprecise notion of the existence of beauty and positivity despite all of those things. How do negative experiences – pain, hurt, rage, sorrow, regret – provide inspiration? How would you define or describe the positive that comes from negative emotions or experiences?
I think the positive side of those experiences is the book itself. The negative experiences don’t provide inspiration necessarily, but they do provide a need to create meaning. In a lifetime you are given a wide variety of experiences. Good, bad, random, traumatic. Your life can be going pretty well for a while and then suddenly, in an instant, everything can shift. It takes a moment, a single day. The most painful things tend to be the experiences we can’t control or we feel disenfranchised by. Even positive experiences can have a negative effect if we feel our agency is compromised and someone else is pulling the strings. One of the great gifts of being a writer is the ability to shape and reshape your narrative. Doesn’t matter if the experience is good or bad, pedestrian or heroic, random or pre-determined, as a writer your job is to find inventive ways to translate your life into language. Sometimes this means taking a shitty experience and finding a way to make it beautiful. Sometimes it means taking a cliché experience and making it strange, defamiliarizing it in a unique way. The hope you mention in RAIL is not about liberation or salvation or anything like that, it’s about acknowledging the meaninglessness of life, the crappiness, the discomfort, and believing in a continuum beyond the self. It’s about the faith in motion and disintegration, seeing the beauty in a broken world and persisting regardless.
9. Many of the poems in Rail are rife with vivid descriptions of physical locations and surroundings, of minute details that cement the memory of a given place as unique. Your location and surroundings appear to be deeply important to you, as an individual and as a writer. How do you view or perceive the relationship between one’s surroundings and their mental, emotional, or spiritual state? To what degree is our mental state influenced or determined by our surroundings? Is there a relationship between this dynamic, and your consistent desire to move, to leave, as described in Rail?
Landscape has always affected me deeply, not just a physical location but the way the wind moves, the quality of light, the smell of a rainstorm. People tend to see landscape as a background detail, incidental, a stage for the human drama to play out in. But I think it’s the other way around. In my experience, consciousness adapts to the atmosphere it exists in. Culture develops according to the tonal vibrations of a place. When a person moves from one country to another, one climate to another, they don’t just have a hard time adapting because of cultural differences, they’re also adapting to a new consciousness intrinsic in the weather, the climate, the land itself.
When I write about soy fields, for instance (which I write about a lot in my poems), I’m writing about the consciousness of the speaker. Soy fields represent a bland mass-produced product. Homogeny, repetition. Alfalfa fields, on the other hand, represent a uniquely brilliant flowering. Alfalfa fields have a lovely aroma and appear almost neon gold when they bloom. Each location contains a different consciousness, each city a different tone. In the intro to Rail, Nick Flynn pointed out the use of ‘secondary cities’ in the poems. Fargo, Dundas, Minot, Bellingham, etc. In part, this is because those cities are on rail lines, but also because those cities represent psychological states. Dundas is synonymous with memory and childhood, Bellingham is synonymous with depression, Portland is synonymous with the unattainable (heaven), Northtown Yard is synonymous with community. The locations in the book migrate from the Midwest to the West Coast, then back to the Midwest, and the consciousness of the speaker changes in relation to the landscapes.
The whole book moves in the shape of a circle, but a circle that ends a little askew from where it started. For instance, the first poem is about outer landscapes and oil, and the last poem is about inner landscapes and fire.
10. In “AMERICAN FREIGHT” (p. 51), and in extensive specific detail in “O DAY FULL OF GRACE” (p. 92) you invoke your grandparents, and their experiences of struggle and disaster. How are you specifically, and humans collectively, influenced and shaped and molded by the experiences and strife and joys and horrors of our ancestors? Do you believe that it’s important to know and understand what our ancestors went through in the process of forging the present?
Yeah, definitely. Our identities are not limited to our selves. We extend backwards into the past and forward into the future. The story I’m trying to tell is also my father’s story, my grandfather’s story, my mother’s, my grandmother’s. We are part of a web of inherited history and I wanted this to be present in the book.
For instance, my grandmother on my dad’s side (Elizabeth Wee) suffered from Alzheimer’s during the last ten years of her life, and there’s a theme throughout the book about the dissolution of memory and the erasure of the past. This is a comment on America itself, but it’s also about my grandmother. At the end of her life she couldn’t remember much, but she could remember how to play songs on the piano. That’s why there’s a large theme of music and recurring sounds throughout the book.
On my mom’s side, my grandfather (Roald Carlson) was a lover of water. He loved boating. He loved being out on the open sea. There’s a theme of boats and floating that reverberates through the book. Ocean, water, waves. This is his theme, his melody. I tried to fill the book with a sense of mythology that was personal and unique. There are metaphors and similes, of course, references to other poems, but the larger structure is autobiographically symbolic, based on personalized archetypes and recurring themes.
11. Although it does look towards the future, the impersonal past, and things not bound by linear time, Rail is highly reflective. Clearly, your personal memories, of real events and the associated emotions, were the primary source material. Further, “PIKE” (p. 65) examines the relationship between your grandmother at the end of her life and her memories. In what ways are our identities intertwined with and defined by our memories? Since we are constantly engaged in the process of creating new memories, what can or should we do in the present to make our eventual memories more powerful, more meaningful, more vivid?
Memory is a tricky thing. In one way it seems permanent, immutable, but in another way it gets revised as we age. The same way history gets rewritten to serve the needs of a contemporary narrative, our memories are edited to serve the needs of our current identity. This isn’t a new idea, but I wanted to explore what happens when that process breaks down, when memory dissolves via mental illness or something like Alzheimer’s. What happens when you don’t remember your own children, but you remember a song from your childhood, for instance. What do our memories mean once the narrative thread is lost?
When I went through my second mental breakdown there was a feeling of my entire ego collapsing, an “ego death” it’s sometimes called, and I felt all the pieces of my life, my entire history, every possible future, every single memory I thought I owned, completely fall away. I thought I was dying or had already died. My brother found me collapsed outside, vomiting into a snowbank. This experience, along with a few other visions I’ve had, have made me think about memory as a much less stable thing. There’s a dismemberment theme in the book, animals and people getting cut into pieces, tornados breaking things apart, and I was thinking about how American culture commits a similar kind of historical violence, a memory violence.
I don’t know what we can do to prevent this from happening, but part of the job of being a writer is to invest in thoughts, moments, fragments, illuminations. “Spots of time,” as Wordsworth says. In the end, of course, we’re all going to die, and with each death, a universe also dies. But through art there’s a loophole, a way to stop time and preserve, at least in glimpses, a sense of wholeness.
12. In spite of the moments of serenity, camaraderie, and love in Rail, you clearly went through a journey of difficulty, depression, sleep deprivation and hunger, and extreme uncertainty. How would you describe the person that emerged from all of those things? How did those things shape and create the person and writer that you are today?
When I go through periods of depression I get very superstitious. I feel a lack of meaning and clarity and my mind starts to make sense of things randomly, almost out of desperation. I attach a lot of significance to trivial things, like a word on a billboard or the color of a plastic bag. I start noticing synchronicities and coincidences, ways in which the universe is trying to communicate. When I travel, especially if I don’t have a set plan, this all gets exacerbated and there’s a sense of fate that emerges. It’s one of the mystical things about traveling and I honestly don’t know if my brain is just inventing stuff or there’s a deeper force out there directing me, operating on a frequency I can occasionally tap into. Either way, it’s made me a more spiritual person. More open to circumstance and the beauty of movement. I take photos and shoot video sometimes, and I can feel a version of this happening when I’m really tuned into my surroundings. Things tend to constellate and symbols emerge. For instance, throughout Rail I use the color green to signify this phenomenon (green waves, green light, turtles, etc.). I had a vision once where I saw all aspects of the world connected by a green, web-like substance. It looked like liquid spiderwebs weaving everything together, existing outside of time. I don’t feel like I’ve emerged from these experiences exactly, but I know I’ve been changed by them. I’m still being changed by them.
13. In “POET AT TWENTY-FOUR” (p. 35) you describe the way that you looked out towards the world, in its constancy and simplicity, for inspiration. If you had to issue a thank you to the elements of life, society, existence, America that provided you with the greatest inspiration – that catalyzed your success as a poet and creative – who, or what would you thank?
Oh man, that’s a hard one. So many things. So many people. I suppose I’d first want to thank my parents for the way they raised me. Unconditional love—the deepest kind. They supported me through so many tough patches when I had a hard time believing in myself. They are my heroes. I’d thank my brothers, my extended family on both sides. The community of Holden Village in the Cascade Mountains. It’s been such a healing place for me over the years. Railroad Creek for all it’s taught me. Kabekona Lake. Copper Peak. Bolinas, California. Buena Vista Park where I go running every morning in San Francisco. My coyote friend who lives there. I’d thank the animals I’ve killed and/or eaten in my life, the plants I’ve killed, the eagles that have offered me solace at times, the trains that have slowed down unexpectedly, the cars that have pulled off to the shoulder to offer me a ride. The artists and poets who have inspired me to continue. I’d thank the people I’ve shared intimate space with, the friends who encourage me toward magic. I’d thank the words that arrive and keep arriving, the forces that allow me to exist in the world, in this body, for a short time between two equal infinities. I’m so grateful for all of it. The whole song and dance. The panoply.
Kevin Monagan is a student at the University of Minnesota, studying psychology, political science, and English. His principal interest is in language and the ways that it can be used to tell our stories.
Kai Carlson-Wee is the author of Rail (BOA, 2018). He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and his work has appeared in Ploughshares, Best New Poets, TriQuarterly, Gulf Coast, and The Missouri Review, which awarded him the 2013 Editor's Prize. His photography has been featured in Narrative Magazine and his poetry film, Riding the Highline, received jury awards at the 2015 Napa Valley Film Festival and the 2016 Arizona International Film Festival. With his brother Anders, he has co-authored two chapbooks, Mercy Songs (Diode Editions) and Two-Headed Boy (Organic Weapon Arts), winner of the 2015 Blair Prize. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in San Francisco and is a lecturer at Stanford University.